Materials of volost courts of the Southern Trans-Urals region as a historical and legal source

The aim of the proposed article is to determine the value of the decisions of volost courts as a historical and legal source. The archive funds of the State Archives of the Kurgan Region (GAKO) and the State Archives of Shadrinsk were used as sources for writing the article, in which the decisions of the volost courts of the Kurgan and Shadrinsk districts were concentrated from the second half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. In the article the author sets the following tasks: to determine the role of volost courts in the legal life of the peasant community, to analyze the main types of offenses and crimes among the Southern Trans-Urals peasantry, to reveal the features and causes of these violations. Common law was an integral part of the legal culture of the peasantry of Russia, including Siberia, and the Trans-Urals. In the last third of the 19 century, many ethnographers, historians and lawyers paid attention to this, and carefully studied the materials of volost courts, in which there were examples of the application of a common law. Volost courts were the keepers of the common legal traditions of the peasant community, which in each region of Russia had their own characteristics. The article proves that the materials of volost courts have significant historical value. With the help of these materials, it is possible to determine the specifics of the development of the Southern Trans-Urals peasant community. Among such features were: partial exile-settlement nature of its formation, relatively free status in the family and community, lawsuits on cooperative butter-making. Each of these features had its own causes and consequences. Thus, the exile-settlement nature of the formation of the Southern Trans-Urals peasant community practically had no significance at the end of the 19th century as a result of the relocation of borders of exile to the East of Siberia. The emancipation of the Southern Trans-Urals woman due to the demographic situation allowed them to play a rather significant role in the family and the community. The development of butter-making in the Kurgan Uyezd, as a result of favorable economic factors, allowed peasants to leave the sphere of common law relations to the sphere of official and normative law. From a legal point of view, the materials of the decisions of volost courts of the Southern Trans-Ural make it possible to analyze to a certain extent the crime rate in the peasant environment, the types of offenses among peasants, the gradual transformation of customary law under the influence of modernization processes. As a result of the research, the author comes to the following conclusions: the decisions of volost courts are the most important historical and legal source allowing to reconstruct the historical picture of the legal behavior and legal culture of the peasantry, both in a separate region and in the whole of the Russian Empire.

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